Array Expansion & logical disk corruption

[DavidBlake]

Hi,
recently I had to expand the arrays/logical drives on a number of our servers (ml370 G3/4's). Most of them went quite smoothly however we had trouble on two of them.

We had problems on two servers. Both were ML370 G3's, the array cards were Smart Array 5300's. Both servers had 5 x 72 GB drives configured as a single array and a single (raid 5) logical drive. Both had a 6th 72GB drive added, after which it was added to the existing array. The logical drive was then expanded.

What occured was that during the array/logical drive expansion the OS (W2k3 SP1) reported 1000's of event 51 errors (An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0 during a paging operation.) and the OS became extremely unstable - response to the console was very slow, I had to connect via ILO as RDP sessions were unuseable. apps running on the server (eg domino server) was unuseable.

Once the second phase of the expansion completed (the logival drive) the errors stopped. I could then extend the data partition in the OS without any trouble and the server response returned to "normal".

Has anyone seen this type of behaviour before or have an idea as to what might have caused it?